| Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels |  | Author: Wolf Kahn
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $23.82
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Sales Rank: 301,369
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 10.4 x 10.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0810967960
EAN: 9780810967960
ASIN: 0810967960
Publication Date: October 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Wolf Kahn, whose lyrical and beautiful landscapes are among America's best-loved contemporary paintings, has traveled the world in pursuit of his art. In this charming book, he describes his travels across the United States, illustrating his adventures with the works he created on his journeys. In a series of short essays, each only a few paragraphs in length, Kahn recalls the places in America where he has traveled to work as well as the problems those diverse locations presented to him as an artist, and how he solved them. In one section, he writes of the difficulty of capturing the dark tones and rough textures of the sea, with the special light effects that signal a given time of day. In another he writes of the gradations of color and value density in a bramble thicket in the Maine woods. Other short essays are simply personal memories, charming and anecdotal reminiscences of life on the road. This is delightful and refreshing look at the world of a painter, seen through the candid and unpretentious eyes of one of America's most popular artists, is accompanied by 100 of Kahn's superbly reproduced oil paintings and pastels. John Updike's introduction, a tribute to an admired friend, is an added bonus.
Amazon.com Review
A popular painter who claims to hate traveling has written a "travel book" illustrated with his own brightly colored landscapes. What's that all about? Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels is actually a record of the pleasant American locales Kahn has visited over the past forty-odd years in order to teach a workshop, attend an exhibition of his work or fulfill a commission from a wealthy patron. A refugee from Nazi Germany, born in 1927, he understandably prefers the comforts of home to the anxieties of travel. Yet he finds visual inspiration everywhere he goes, even in a restaurant parking lot overlooking a marsh. Kahn gracefully interweaves studio shop talk about color with brief observations about specific landscapes and the inevitable mishaps of travel. The book includes 100 full-color reproductions of his gentle, quasi-abstract renderings of barns and dunes, woods and shorelines, sunsets and snowy fields. The painting sites range from Maine to Florida, with excursions to Yosemite and New Mexico, but Kahn's high-keyed colors and favored compositional devices vary only slightly. Although he studied with Hans Hofmann and writes of friendships with other major American painters, his own work has a prettified quality at odds with his peers. One of the challenges of landscape painting, he writes, is to find locales "where comfort and subject coincide." Kahn's most self-revealing moment occurs when he asks Fairfield Porter why he painted a gas tank in the foreground of a Maine landscape. Porter replies that the tank was in his field of vision and he doesn't want to "censor" landscape. Kahn writes that he respects this point of view, but "I certainly would have kept the gas tank out." —-Cathy Curtis
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